Square Enix's new murder-mystery shooter Killer Inn can't decide if it wants to be Clue or Counter-Strike, but it taught me that sniping is way easier than lying

It's been a hot minute since Among Us, but the ease at which I take to murdering players in Killer Inn suggests that being a no-good sneak transcends individual games. Killer Inn – Square Enix and Tactic Studios' take on the social deduction genre – does away with the one-click killing that has sent countless crewmates to their doom, turning your run-of-the-mill murder mansion into a tense third-person shooter.

I recently played three matches of Killer Inn – two as a Lamb who must survive long enough to escape or kill their hunters, one as a Wolf tasked with murdering every Lamb – and the shooting elements pose an interesting question. At what point is it easier to go guns-blazing because you're a better sniper than a liar?

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Though Killer Inn's 24-player matches can initially feel crowded, the game deviously encourages breaking away to do your own thing. The inn's staff offer fairly straightforward quests, revolving around retrieving jewels from marked stashes, and these reward you with gold that can be used to buy gear. During my first match as a Lamb, instead of blobbing up to guarantee safety in numbers, I felt more comfortable sprinting around completing quests on my own; spending gold on guns and armor to make myself as hard to kill as possible.

It's a neat way of giving everyone – not just the killers – more purpose, and by the time my fellow Lambs started turning up dead, I felt pretty secure with a shotgun in my hands. A few of us better-geared players started to band together in search of more bodies, which similarly feels more practical than wandering around and hoping to catch a killer in the act. Killers can leave forensic evidence on their victims – find a scrap of blue cloth on a body, for example, and you'll be shown every character in the game wearing blue clothes.

Wolves can scour clues by cleaning a crime scene, but in the games I played, this didn't see much use. Even once a player has been unmasked as a Wolf, actually tracking them down and killing them is a task in itself. Killer Inn's map is a sprawling Clue-esque mansion complete with secret passages and hidden tunnels; while the Wolf is presumably loaded to the gills with weapons. As the survivors started putting names to Wolves, the match devolved into the sort of late-round chaos you'd expect from shooters like Valorant and Counter-Strike – everyone is blasting at everyone, though the shooting is a touch too light and floaty to feel as satisfying. The ultimate goal is to reach your ship and raise anchors to escape, which serves to funnel players into one last deathmatch. While I ended up as the last Lamb standing, I still ended up bludgeoned to death after a frantic shootout.

Playing as a Wolf, I once more prioritized quests – this time, admittedly, for less noble intentions than self-defense. While I wanted to buy a knife for stealthy backstab kills, I couldn't get the controls right to do so, which meant I ended up just awkwardly hovering behind other players until other Wolves started their own killing across the map. I tagged along with a bunch of Lambs – and even pretended to join in suppressing one of the Wolves they had cornered in a kitchen – until finding a rifle and breaking off mid-firefight to skulk onto a balcony overlooking the grounds. While the Lambs outside were focused on the cornered Wolf, I began picking off Lambs until the group scattered; and spent another five minutes headshotting stragglers as they stumbled upon the bodies.

This slower, more methodical shooting feels like a much better fit for Killer Inn than the end-of-round scramble. Broadly, the pacing is slightly jumpy: the more in-depth investigative mechanics should compliment the whole thing, but being able to uncover eight Wolves through detective work – all before the harbor rush begins – feels at odds with having to quickly gear up to survive when things get loud.

I died almost immediately in my third match, which means there are some features – like item upgrades and more on clues – I didn't see as much as I'd have liked. I can't quite decide if Killer Inn wants to appeal to shooter fans or the more casual audiences that social deduction games tend to aim for, which is a concern as I already worry the game's 24-player matches could be too large to consistently fill.

Still, Killer Inn has a wonderfully gothic atmosphere and excellent investigative mechanics that would shine if the whole game could be slowed down a tad. I'm hoping Killer Inn can feel a little more cohesive by launch, because it wonderfully taps into gaming's singular truth: shooting people and lying about it is inherently very funny.

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